The Internet, like so many other high tech developments, grew from research originally performed by the United States Department of Defense. In the 1960s, the military had accumulated a large collection of incompatible computer networks. Computers on these different networks could not communicate with other computers across their network boundaries.
In the 1960s, the Defense Department wanted to develop a communication system that would permit communication between these different computer networks. Recognizing that a single, centralized communication system would be vulnerable to attacks or sabotage, the Defense Department required that the communication system be decentralized with no critical services concentrated in vulnerable failure points. In order to achieve this goal, the Defense Department established a decentralized standard communication protocol for communication between their computer networks.
A few years later, the National Science Foundation (NSF) wanted to facilitate communication between incompatible network computers at various research institutions across the country. The NSF adopted the Defense Department's protocol for communication, and this combination of research computer networks would eventually evolve into the Internet.